Bolo’bolo: How to Grow Without Losing Emancipatory Power

By Stefan Gruber

Bolo’bolo depicts a utopian-ecological
future in which citizens—the bolos—lead a self-determined and self-sufficient
life in autonomous communities. First published in 1983, a time when the rebellious
youth spirit that fueled Zurich’s
virulent punk and squatter scene was running out of steam, the narrative fiction aimed at capturing insights gained from years of living
in squatting communities. Little did the anonymous author know that his
anarchist vision would be translated into eight languages and serve as the
blueprint for actual co-op housing developments. Far from remaining fiction,
today Kraftwerk 1 and 2, as well as Zwicky Süd, comprising 242 sought-after
dwellings total, offer tangible housing models for a commons-based life beyond
real estate speculation and capitalist consumerism.

The proposed essay will trace the
trajectory from Zurich’s squatter movement to the self-initiated development of
Kraftwerk 1 and its two satellite off-springs, and all the way to the recent
creation of Neustart Schweiz, an umbrella organization aiming at supporting and
amplifying commons-based initiatives across Switzerland. Drawing from personal
interviews with Hans Widmer (aka. p.m.) the essay explores the unlikely
synergies between visions of systemic change and experiences from the messiness
of everyday communal living, between radical imagining and grassroots activism.
What can we learn from p.m.’s experience about the power of fiction as tool for
the bottom-up transformation of cities? What principles seeded by bolo’bolo have proven to be
relevant for shaping communities and in turn the spaces they live in? And what
does the evolution from bolo’bolo to
Neustat Schweiz reveal about the challenges of institutionalization without the
loss of emancipatory power?

More broadly, the essay presents
an opportunity to frame the tensions and conflicts inherent to practices of
sharing from a commons perspective.
Commoning here is understood as process of negotiating differences and
conflicts between the individual, the community and society; a process that
spatially organizes relationships of production and re-production, ownership
and access to resources; it is a process that establishes networks of
solidarity and redefines individual and collective rights. Accordingly, the essay proposes
to analyze bolo’bolo, Kraftwerk1 and Zwicky Süd by focusing on three fields of tensions:
Ownership-Access, Production-Reproduction and Rights-Solidarity. How do these cases challenge our understanding of ownership?
What strategies are used to decouple exchange value from use value, and thus
resist the commodification of housing? How do the new collective forms of
working and living tackle the modernist separation of the domestic and
productive sphere? How do the housing typologies challenge normative living
conventions beyond the nuclear-family and stereotypical gender roles? How do its
residents define life in common beyond nostalgic notions of community and the
risk of essentializing identity? And how do the governance models balance
regulation and solidarity, especially in regard to responsibilities that
transgress the housing community in the wake of global ecological and migration
crisis?

These and other fundamental questions on practices of commoning
are raised by the close reading of bolo’bolo, and its architectural renderings
of Kraftwerk1 and Zwicky Süd, whose story spans over three decades of resisting
the commodification and standardization of housing.

Stefan Gruber is the Lucian and Rita Caste Assistant
Professor and chair of the Master of Urban Design Program at Carnegie Mellon
University. Stefan is the co-author of Spaces
of Commoning (with Baldauf, Anette et al. Sternberg, 2016), as well as a
social fiction The Report (with Ana
Dzokic et al. MAK, Museum for Applied Arts Vienna, 2015). Stefan is currently
co-curating the travelling exhibition and publication An Atlas of Commoning with ARCH+ and ifa to open in the Summer of
2018 in Berlin.

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